This is the box-lid Newcastle, timber-backed. The streets go across the grain. At the painted turn the wood resumes its branching; a knot diverts the traffic round a tree that isn’t there. You can play on it. Take your shoes off. The other version takes all afternoon to cross. The harbour in the full-sized set has depth but needs to stay outside. Ships come separately, the red of their undersides tide-ruled, salt-flaked. Freight is extra. So is the void. A mouth this size will take another person without either face conceding its arrangement. For two or three players, never one. The fork counts its handle as a third direction. Ages up to and including whoever got here first. The tokens are around here somewhere, feel your pockets - not those. The ones somebody else is wearing. Between the Travel Edition here and the real thing, call it a ratio of one to ten thousand. A ship is a watch battery on a wire horizon. A hotel leaves a paint chip under the nail. The full set comes assembled. Everyone is in it. If you cannot locate yourself, stand behind someone. The old council chambers stood behind someone else and became a luxury hotel. When you shake a quilt here one corner will never come square. The building was hollow in its centre, the Obelisk could fit inside and like an axle the council was able to spin in revolutions until it became five-star accomodation. Elsewhere the place is professionally vacant, populated by community gardeners who have seeded the carpets to grow wheat fields beneath the fluorescence. Roots unpick the woven floor, watered by sprinkler systems, animals graze and loosen the light among the stalks. Alongside other simultaneous ontologies, a tyre mark crosses the carpet and keeps going. The whole cylindrical trajectory has been cast as a supercar raceway, think Mattara Hill Climb but in reverse, rolling down from the apogee, floor after floor into one long gear-whine. You’ll need your card for the lift, the receptionist says. The wheat catches at the driver’s sleeve. A sheep steps sideways for the trolley. Hot rubber and cut hay fill the lift together. I interviewed one of the drivers for this piece. He’s the green-gold one, hair still taking corners. His hard second head has gone quiet under his arm but keeps his heat. The loose strap taps his wrist. Above one eye the lining has left a red half-moon. I ask about the tyres for watered carpet, what being painted does to grip; does he slow down where the council played its endgame? When do you expect the apocalypse to arrive and will it have any impact on your career? What do you think about art, being painted in situ, will it have any impact on your careening around the centrifuge, will you be able to outrun the end? Is that this season? He scratches at the salt beside his eyebrow. There’s a briefing if the conditions change, he says. They don’t leave all of that to us. He was seven. The southbound train kept shaking a book of fortress towns across his knees, black steeples, hatchings, a thumbprint field outside. He copied one. The rails put little gates in the pencil wall. He rubbed them shut. He left a road for people coming home, crossed it out, then crossed it back. He held the board game to the window. He held the thinning paper to the glass. A paddock travelled through the streets, then water, trees, all going in reverse. He says he’d had enough of Sydney. Newcastle has a fort. He said the city had charges under it, ready to untown the downtown. He likes it when somebody has thought ahead. A crocodile lies door-long by the lift. Its tail holds the door against the motor's wish. The wings nose into it and ease apart. Its yellow eye stays open. We take the stairs. He keys his room. The lamp comes on beneath a ship. Somebody has worked the bedclothes round the hull, a hospital corner tucked up under iron. Three-hundred metres long, one-hundred-sixty-five thousand tonnes of coal tumbling out of his overnight bag. Who let this coal ship into his bed. He checks his door-card. That’s where I sleep, he says. He contemplates calling on the Mayor of Newcastle, dressed as a seagull, made of chalk. Outside the young people are all dressed as animals, dirt hearts, they see the future in tiny pieces. There is room for an entire city in this five-star suite. He puts a foot between the bed and hull, bends sideways, dreams of being a lighthouse. The helmet wasn’t in the painting. I made it up then fitted him a childhood and a fear. He works a shoulder past the stern. Salt whites his sleeve. I have another question but he's already fast asleep. Somewhere the staircase reaches painted ground. In this version the artist falls down. Her knee finds the top edge and her hand goes flat, quick on the paving, holding up the rest. From the graze, a few hard clinks. Glass scatters, toe-small. We cup our hands between it and the artist. A crocodile lies leg-up, pale-emerald; inside its lung a bubble of air keeps round. Then a cage with transparent arches, an eye ball staring at the ceiling of the world. Their cold comes through my palm. I turn one. Some architects work externally, others set out the interior load: how to site a town in a head, moor a coal ship in a queen-sized bed shaped like a wharf in pieces, while the hotel keeps one room empty for what was and none yet clear for what is coming. Art is a map that conceals its scale and calls itself the world. The End of every game is built into its construction. The wound can only be healed by taking the fall and painting it full of alternatives. No-one is breaking the rules. That's a problem. At the end of each turn, players may inspect one event they were too close to see while it occurred. That's where dreams come from, they are not what daylight hid from us. They are daylight coming home enlarged.